Beantin Beta Bloghttp://beta.beantin.se
Experiments, investigations, and tests of web things. This blog is going to be raw, possibly even wrong at times. It’s will hopefully have a similar mix of technical and non-techncial as my main blog, although i’m not promising anything. So those of you who are a little less technical, hold tight just in case...Thu, 17 May 2018 21:52:54 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.859.279918.0899http://beantin.se/http://media.t1n.se/beantin-logo-feedburner.pngBeantin webbkommunikationWordPress: setting the language on individual pageshttp://beta.beantin.se/wordpress-setting-language-individual-pages/
http://beta.beantin.se/wordpress-setting-language-individual-pages/#commentsFri, 27 Jun 2014 13:33:36 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=667TweetWordPress by default has only one language setting. Setting up a full blown multi-language site might be overkill. Here is how you can get the correct language on each blog post and on each page. There are a number of important (technical) reasons to set the correct language for your content. One of them is […]

WordPress by default has only one language setting. Setting up a full blown multi-language site might be overkill. Here is how you can get the correct language on each blog post and on each page.

There are a number of important (technical) reasons to set the correct language for your content. One of them is accessibility and screen readers. They use the lang attribute in the html tag to decide how to read the content. Another is search engines. Some of them make use of the content-language meta tag in deciding the language of the content.

Setting it correctly is never going to be a bad thing for your content!

How to do it

Create a page. You can have this hidden/not indexed or visible in your menu.

Add the code show below to your functions.php file.

Change the page ID of 565 in the code to the page ID of the page you just created

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/wordpress-setting-language-individual-pages/feed/1How to find & favourite “Most Recent” on Facebook’s mobile apphttp://beta.beantin.se/find-favorite-most-recent-facebook-mobile-app/
http://beta.beantin.se/find-favorite-most-recent-facebook-mobile-app/#commentsFri, 30 May 2014 19:03:51 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=644TweetFor some reason only known to Facebook, they are constantly trying to force “Top Stories” on people. Many people, myself included, like to see a feed of updates as they happen – the “Most Recent” feed. On the latest versions of the Facebook app for mobile (Spring 2014 at the time of writing) the main […]

For some reason only known to Facebook, they are constantly trying to force “Top Stories” on people. Many people, myself included, like to see a feed of updates as they happen – the “Most Recent” feed. On the latest versions of the Facebook app for mobile (Spring 2014 at the time of writing) the main feed on the app is always “Top Stories”.

“Most Recent” is still there, but it’s quite hidden. In this post I’ll show you where it is in the Android app and how to favourite it so that it’s easier to get to.

Step 1

To find “Most Recent” click on the “hamburger” icon to the top right of the app. Then scroll down until you reach the section titled “Feeds”. The first item here will be “Most Recent”. Remember where this is for later!

Step 2

Scroll further down until you reach the “help & settings” section. Click on “Edit Favorites”.

Step 3

Scroll back up to where we’d found “Most Recent” and press the star icon. A question will pop up asking if you really want to make this a favorite. Of course you do! So say yes…

Step 4

Scroll right up to the top to the “Favourites” section. You’ll see lots of “hamburger” icons to the right. Press and hold the hamburger on the “Most Recent” row and drag the row up to just below “News Feed”

Step 5

We’re done! So press “Finished Editing”

Simple access to Most Recent

Now all you need to do to get to the latests updates on Facebook is to press the top right icon on the menu row and you’ll see “Most Recent” as the first link.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/find-favorite-most-recent-facebook-mobile-app/feed/4Google Plus location sharing privacy settingshttp://beta.beantin.se/google-plus-location-sharing-privacy-settings/
http://beta.beantin.se/google-plus-location-sharing-privacy-settings/#respondWed, 25 Sep 2013 18:59:14 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=626TweetI’ve always been a fan of Google Latitude. It was really quite useful in a number of situations to see the exact location of friends and family. Google recently shut Latitude down and replaced the functionality with location in Google Plus. Google’s instructions on how to turn on location sharing can be found here. The […]

I’ve always been a fan of Google Latitude. It was really quite useful in a number of situations to see the exact location of friends and family. Google recently shut Latitude down and replaced the functionality with location in Google Plus.

The default setting is to just share your location with yourself, which is private but not particularly social.

You can see me

What I’ve done is create a new circle called You can see me. I’ve then added people to that circle who I’d like to share my location with.

After that, I went into my Google Plus settings and found the section called Location (pictured). Here you can set who can see your pinpoint location (exact location, like good old latitude) as well as who can see your city level location.

I’ve chosen custom then added my You can see me circle as well as my Family circle.

Now, if I want to let someone see where I am, I just add them to the circle – no need to dive into any settings!

Encourage your friends to share location

You can’t send location sharing requests in the same way as you could with Latitude, but you can post an update to your newly created You can see me circle and encourage them to location share.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/google-plus-location-sharing-privacy-settings/feed/0Disable comments and pingbacks on old posts in WordPresshttp://beta.beantin.se/disable-comments-pingbacks-old-posts-wordpress/
http://beta.beantin.se/disable-comments-pingbacks-old-posts-wordpress/#commentsTue, 16 Jul 2013 07:38:15 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=608TweetIt’s pretty straight forward to turn off pingbacks and comments in WordPress. It’s just a checkbox under “settings” and “discussion”… but what’s not obvious from that setting is that it only applies to new posts created after you made the change. If you’ve got a fair few existing posts, it’d be time consuming to edit […]

It’s pretty straight forward to turn off pingbacks and comments in WordPress. It’s just a checkbox under “settings” and “discussion”… but what’s not obvious from that setting is that it only applies to new posts created after you made the change.

If you’ve got a fair few existing posts, it’d be time consuming to edit each post and alter the settings individually for each one. You also might find someone telling you to go into the database and alter something there.

Nope. Updating the settings of all the old posts is much easier than that, it’s just a little hidden.

Here’s what you do:

Go to your posts page

Expand the screen options section

Change the options so you’ve got a decent number of posts on screen

Apply the screen options change

Select all posts

Choose “edit” in the bulk options drop down.

Set “comments” to “do not allow” (to disable commenting)

Set “pings” to “do not allow” (to disable pingbacks)

Click on the “update” button.

If you didn’t set your screen options high enough to show all posts, then you’ll need to repeat the above for “page 2” of all posts (and 3… 4.. etc)

Turning off pings helps reduce the amount of spam coming into your WordPress installation, even if you are using Disqus or akismet.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/disable-comments-pingbacks-old-posts-wordpress/feed/9Increase the amount of site speed data in Google Analyticshttp://beta.beantin.se/increase-the-amount-of-site-speed-data-in-google-analytics/
http://beta.beantin.se/increase-the-amount-of-site-speed-data-in-google-analytics/#respondMon, 11 Mar 2013 19:46:16 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=548TweetOut of the box, Google Analytics only records the navigation timing information for about 1% of page views. Unless you’ve got a relatively big and busy site that generates over 10,000 “hits” to Google Analytics per day, then you will want to increase that sample rate and record as much page load speed information as […]

Out of the box, Google Analytics only records the navigation timing information for about 1% of page views.

Unless you’ve got a relatively big and busy site that generates over 10,000 “hits” to Google Analytics per day, then you will want to increase that sample rate and record as much page load speed information as possible into GA.

Add: “_gaq.push([‘_setSiteSpeedSampleRate’, 100]);” directly before the ‘_trackpageview’ line in your Google Analytics code snippet. This tells GA to atempt to record the navigation timing information for 100% of pageviews.

I say “attempt” as if you have passed the 10,000 “hits” limit that day, then it won’t be recorded. Google will automatically lower the sample rate down (to a minimum of 1%)

Google themselves encourage you to set the sample rate to 1% if you have over “a million hits a day”. I haven’t experimented to see what the affect not doing this has, but it probably doesn’t make any noticable difference if you leave it at 100% no matter how busy your site is.

If you’re feeling kind, then you could nudge the sampling percentage down – work it out yourself. If you have 20,000 pageviews a day (and each pageview only generates one “hit” – you may have events causing other kinds of “hits”) then you could set the sample rate to 50%.

Those of you with a WordPress site and using Yoast’s Google Analytics for WordPress plugin will need to paste _gaq.push([‘_setSiteSpeedSampleRate’, 100]); into the “Custom code” box in the settings.

The Site Speed reports give you access to precise page loading information for specific pages. This is wonderfully useful information to help optimise your site and its content.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/increase-the-amount-of-site-speed-data-in-google-analytics/feed/0Moving from Posterous to WordPresshttp://beta.beantin.se/moving-from-posterous-to-wordpress/
http://beta.beantin.se/moving-from-posterous-to-wordpress/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 14:30:48 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=538TweetPosterous is dying. Twitter bought it in 2012 and left it in maintenance mode. So, it was time to move UX Podcast from there to a self-hosted WordPress site. There is an backup function now within Posterous (which was a feature promised by Twitter), but so far I’ve not heard of anyone who has managed […]

Posterous is dying. Twitter bought it in 2012 and left it in maintenance mode. So, it was time to move UX Podcast from there to a self-hosted WordPress site.

There is an backup function now within Posterous (which was a feature promised by Twitter), but so far I’ve not heard of anyone who has managed to get it to produce anything. It gets stuck on “finalizing”.

WordPress (self-hosted) doesn’t have a Posterous import plugin anymore, so many people have been using wordpress.com as a middleman. The import from Posterous function still exists there and works. From there you can export and import to a self-hosted installation.

One problem for me was that UX Podcast was a posterous site with audio attachments. The migration via wordpress.com didn’t really help enough. So what did was to mirror the site as HTML files using Teleport Ultra. I then did some batch editing of the posts using Notepad++. Finally I used a plugin called HTML Import 2 to import the body from the posts to the new WordPress site.

I haven’t found an easy way to move the comments. I had located a script that made use of Posterous’s API, but the API has changed so it didn’t work. Importing to wordpress.com does grab the comments. Thankfully the site has very few comments, so I’ll probably do some XML editing using exported data from there.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/moving-from-posterous-to-wordpress/feed/2Clearing LinkedIn’s link sharing preview cachehttp://beta.beantin.se/clearing-linkedin-link-sharing-preview-cache/
http://beta.beantin.se/clearing-linkedin-link-sharing-preview-cache/#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2013 10:59:52 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=523TweetWhen sharing a link on LinkedIn a preview is generated. This preview uses data from your webpage (Open Graph metadata if present). Sometimes you want to optimise this text, so you test the page first. Unfortunately LinkedIn caches the data it retrieves the first time the link is previewed and keeps it cached for a […]

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/clearing-linkedin-link-sharing-preview-cache/feed/43Page visibility: pause when your web page isn’t visiblehttp://beta.beantin.se/page-visibility-pause-when-not-active/
http://beta.beantin.se/page-visibility-pause-when-not-active/#commentsMon, 05 Nov 2012 10:22:00 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=513TweetThe Page Visibility API is a way for you to (programatically) ask the browser whether your webpage is currently visible or not. Running scripts, videos, refreshes, etc when your webpage is minimised or open in a tab that’s not being viewed is a waste of CPU. Using up CPU time when not needed contributes to […]

The Page Visibility API is a way for you to (programatically) ask the browser whether your webpage is currently visible or not. Running scripts, videos, refreshes, etc when your webpage is minimised or open in a tab that’s not being viewed is a waste of CPU.

Using up CPU time when not needed contributes to making your visitor’s machine/device sluggish and wastes precious battery.

The Page visibility API is still “experimental” but it is supported by the latest versions of Chrome (13 and higher), Firefox (10 and higher) and Internet Explorer (10 and higher). Unfortunately support in mobile devices and Safari seems to be limited. Mozilla gives a good overview of browser support and Google gives some more info and examples too.

If you want to know if your browser supports the Page Visibility API, then Microsoft has provided a really nice straight forward test page.

As the API is still experimental, there is some vendor-prefix soup that you will have to swim through. Here is a useful visibility API wrapper to help simplify that task.

A good use of the page visibility API would be to make sure your sliding banner or carousel stops rotating when no-one is looking. (Best of all would be to take the giant sliding banner away completely!)

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/page-visibility-pause-when-not-active/feed/2Emotional pressure with LinkedIn endorsementshttp://beta.beantin.se/linkedin-endorsements-emotional-pressure/
http://beta.beantin.se/linkedin-endorsements-emotional-pressure/#respondFri, 05 Oct 2012 12:03:04 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=496TweetTowards the end of September LinkedIn made it possible to endorse your connections. You can agree that a particular contact has a certain skill or add suggest skills yourself. The feature itself is quite well implemented. It’s easy to endorse. It’s visually intuitive. It’s endorsing appears to spread rapidly amongst contacts. What was noticable very […]

What was noticable very quicky whilst trying it out was the emotional aspect.

When confronted by the large blue box on a contact’s profile you are pressured into endorsing all of the skills presented to you.

Skills and experience keywords are listed further down profiles. If no-one has given any endorsements yet, then there’s a number of awkward problems. Do I endorse all the skills? or do I endorse just a few? If so, which ones? How is my contact going to react to the skills I didn’t endorse?

If some has already made some endorsements, then you can see how many there are and who has made them. The natural response to endorse the skills that others have already endorsed.

Although nicely implemented (with the exception of the “endorse all” pattern in the blue box), the emotional and psychological aspects to endorsing lead me to question the quality of LinkedIn endorsements.

There’s no hiding the fact that LinkedIn recommendations are of a much higher quality and in my experience honest. Endorsements feel quite spammy and low quality in comparison.

]]>http://beta.beantin.se/linkedin-endorsements-emotional-pressure/feed/0Adding Google Analytics to your Tumblr mobile themehttp://beta.beantin.se/add-google-analytics-tumblr-mobile-iphone-theme/
http://beta.beantin.se/add-google-analytics-tumblr-mobile-iphone-theme/#commentsTue, 18 Sep 2012 09:24:23 +0000http://beta.beantin.se/?p=486TweetUnder the advanced section of the “customize” settings of your Tumblr blog there is the option to “use optimized mobile layout”. Enabling this gives you a quick, clean, simple mobile version of your site which is shown automatically to mobile visitors. One thing is lacks is any analytics script. You may have added Google Analytics […]